Things I forgot to be neurotic about this Christmas.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with me this year, but most of the thing I typically drive myself insane with during this time of the year have pretty much slipped by unnoticed, or done half-assed. It’s not that I’ve been particularly busy – no more than usual, and not like I was two Decembers ago when I was defending my master’s thesis, or three Decembers ago when my grandma had had a stroke.

Nope… nothing out of the ordinary, I’ve just simply just forgotten to worry about:

1) Advent. Evidently, in late November 2010, I was pretty pumped about the Advent activities I had planned for the kids. I even made a fancy calendar thingy.

For the past three years, I’ve filled those cones with treats and promises for special activities. But this year, when we went to get out the Christmas decorations, I discovered that they hadn’t been put away very well last year and were kind of crunched so I threw them away. I was still planning to do Advent things, though, and spent one sleepless night scouring Pinterest for printable calendars and ideas of Random Acts of Kindness we could do each day of Advent. I even made a Google doc with a list. The only problem? I forgot to do them. Yep, you read that right – I forgot to be nice. So that’s good.

2) Christmas cards. Again, something I typically agonize over, and some years I’ve even had professional pictures taken. This year, I had my sister try to take some pictures, but my kids were being super squirrelly. Anna uploaded them and emailed them to me with the message, “Uh, these are pretty not great. Merry Christmas!”

This was the best one, and I seriously considered using it for our cards for about three desperate minutes.

Instead, I spent about 10 minutes making our cards on Snapfish. On Monday. They haven’t even arrived at my house yet, let alone at the homes of the recipients. And, fair warning, if you’re on our Christmas card list AND you follow me on Instagram, they might look slightly familiar.

3) Presents. Now this is pretty bad. Because buying my kids’ presents is pretty much my primary role for Christmas. But, for the longest time I didn’t know what to get Kate, and I figured Sam was easy because he basically just wanted Legos. So I waited. And then I finally went shopping on December 14th.

Do you know what the Lego shelves look like on December 14th? Let me show you.

It was at this point I started to panic.

Kate and I went to nine stores that day, and between what we eventually found in the stores and the online shopping we did from the parking lots, we manged to get what was on Sam’s list. However, needless to say, I did not score rock-bottom prices.

So anyway, while being a neurotic mess isn’t the best way to spend the holiday season, neither is being a complete slacker. Perhaps next year I’ll find a happy medium?